Hans Urs von Balthasar is emerging as a colossus of twentieth-century theology. More and more of his works are being translated. But as yet he is mainly known only through his great multi-volume trilogy 'Glory', 'Theo-Drama' and Theo-Logic'.Aidan Nichols has treated each part of the trilogy and theearly worksin his widely acclaimed 'Introduction to Hans Urs von Balthasar'.In this final volume he explores all von Balthasar'slater works. Many of these works are extremely important, although several are as yet untranslated and several as yet almost unknown. Nichols ranges widely and comprehensively, from journal articles to his major works, such as 'Apokalypse der deutschen Seele', to his final short works. The result is a wholly new perspective on von Balthasar, a contextualising of his trilogy and an illumination of his whole life and work.

Based on diaries and his published works, Nichols presents an account of Adrian Fortescue's developing personality with an interpretative overview of his writing. Beginning with Fortescue's family background, it looks at his reactions to clerical training, and the wider scene, in Rome and Austria-Hungry at the end of the nineteenth century and the attempts of a widely read and imaginative man to adjust to the limits of priestly life in the East End of London, and the home counties in the Edwardian epoch. (Lutterworth Press 2011)

This is the first comprehensive study of the theological significance of Paul Claudel, a poet frequently cited by literary-minded theologians in Europe and theologically-minded poets (such as von Balthasar, de Lubac and Eliot). His writing combines cosmology and history, Bible and metaphysics, liturgy and the drama of human personality. His work, which continues to arouse discussion in France, was acclaimed in his lifetime as the 'summa poetica' of a new Dante. Aidan Nichols' study demonstrates how Claudel's oeuvre, which is not only poetry but theatre and prose including biblical commentaries, constitutes a rich resource for constructive doctrine, liturgical preaching, and theological reflection. As the comparable example of Geoffrey Hill, Professor of Poetry at Oxford suggests, Aidan Nichols illuminates how Claudel's synthesis of many dimensions remains an important way of practising poetry in the Christian tradition today.

This book explores the Liturgy as the manifestation by cultic signs of Christian revelation, the 'setting' of the Liturgy in terms of architectural space, iconography and music, and the poetic response which the revelation the Liturgy carries can produce. The conclusion offers a synthetic statement of the unity of religion, cosmology and art. Aidan Nichols makes the case for Christianity's capacity to inspire high culture - both in principle and through well-chosen historical examples which draw on the best in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism.

Redeeming Beauty explores the richness of orthodox Christian tradition, both Western and Eastern, in matters of 'sacral aesthetics' - a term used to denote the foundations, production and experience of religiously relevant beauty. Aidan Nichols investigates five principal themes: the foundation of beauty in the natural order through divine creative action; explicitly 'evangelical' beauty as a quality of biblical revelation and notably at its climax in Christ; the legitimacy of making and venerating artworks; qualities of the self in relation to objective presentation of the religiously beautiful; and the difficulties of practising a sacral aesthetic, whether as producer or consumer, in an epoch when the visual arts themselves have left behind not only Church but for the greater part the public as well. The thought of theologians such as Augustine, Aquinas, Balthasar, Ratzinger, Bulgakov, Maritain and others are explored.

This book investigates Balthasar's early explorations of music and the other arts, before launching into a ramifying but controlled survey of his - often highly original - interpretations of major philosophers and literary figures in the European tradition from the early modern period until the 1930s. Balthasar seeks not only to discover elements of truth, goodness and beauty generally in a rich range of figures, where especial attention is given to the classical German philosophers (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) and Nietzsche, as well as to dramatists and novelists (notably Goethe, Schiller and Dostoevsky), as well as to intellectual giants of his own century, such as Bergson, Scheler and Barth. He also intends to prove that writers who had lost a living contact with the biblical revelation carried by Christianity were incapable of reconstituting a synthesis of ideas about the goal of man and the universe which could be taken for granted in the high Medieval epoch. At the same time, the modern writers he investigates add, in his view, crucial enhancements of human understanding - particularly in relation to history and the human subject - which must be factored into any new overall vision of the future of the human soul and indeed the human species in its cosmic environment.

This is the first comprehensive study of the theological significance of Paul Claudel, a poet frequently cited by literary-minded theologians in Europe and theologically-minded poets (such as von Balthasar, de Lubac and Eliot). His writing combines cosmology and history, Bible and metaphysics, liturgy and the drama of human personality. His work, which continues to arouse discussion in France, was acclaimed in his lifetime as the 'summa poetica' of a new Dante. Aidan Nichols' study demonstrates how Claudel's oeuvre, which is not only poetry but theatre and prose including biblical commentaries, constitutes a rich resource for constructive doctrine, liturgical preaching, and theological reflection. As the comparable example of Geoffrey Hill, Professor of Poetry at Oxford suggests, Aidan Nichols illuminates how Claudel's synthesis of many dimensions remains an important way of practising poetry in the Christian tradition today.

This study explores the way in which, by way of the Christian mysteries, divine action impacts human life. The triune God acts in Jesus Christ by means of historical events whose effects transcend time and which are mediated through their celebration in memorial and worship. Drawing on both Evangelical and Catholic writers, Nichols provides evidence that the general portrait of Jesus found in the Pauline letters and the four Gospels rests on reliable historical witness. On this basis, he offers a concise Christology which presents Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the Messianic hope of the Old Testament; explores his unique being as laid out in the teaching of the great Ecumenical Councils of the first Christian millennium, and describes how the classic theologian of the Latin tradition, St Thomas Aquinas, sees the chief historical events of Christ's life as affecting humanity throughout future time. Nichols then looks at the Christian concept of God - namely, Trinitarian monotheism. God so conceived can act efficaciously in the created order and does so by the deployment of his Word and Spirit in ways which express for a fallen, historical world, the dynamics of the interaction of the divine Persons in eternity - Persons who now draw human beings within their range. Those gains in understanding are then applied to the individual mysteries of the life of Christ, from his biological conception to his coming Parousia. For each mystery, Nichols describes a biblical preamble; an account of how the mystery is seen by the Liturgy and the Fathers of the Church; illumination from the three theological masters whom the author makes his own in this work - Aquinas, Balthasar and Bulgakov;- and a visual image drawn from the treasury of sacred art.

AftYer a long period of comparative neglect, starting almost immediately upon his death in 1900, John Ruskin began to attract, from the 1960s onwards, a remarkable degree of critical interest. Although the formidably ample Library Edition of Ruskin's works will always constitute the primary basis for interpretation, there is also newly available source material, in the form of letters and (in part) diaries, as well as a scintillating body of modern comment to which the present study seeks to contribute. Ruskin had an extraordinary ability to bring together aesthetics, religion, ecology, and social issues in a unitary, overarching vision, all expressed in a prose style worthy of comparison with any in the English language. All Great Art is Praise focuses especially on the themes of art and religion, for Aidan Nichols takes the view that Ruskin's writings on art cannot be appreciated without taking into account at many points his approach to religion. This volume offers an analytic account of Ruskin's principal writings on art, viewed through the lens of Ruskin's religious claims. For readers new to Ruskin, an opening chapter provides an overview of his work in the context of a life that combined public celebrity with private sorrow. Succeeding chapters consider his comments on art andreligion in broadly chronological order, ending with the highly innovative open letters to working men, and his moving autobiography which was leY unfinished at the time of his descent into madness and death. Ruskin's evaluations of (among others) Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, the Italian Primitives, and the artists of the high Renaissance, gave the Victorians eyes to see. But his writings call for comment not only from literary scholars and art historians but also from students of ideas since they address a wide range of issues in both theology and philosophy. The volume looks especially closely at Ruskin's changing attitudes to Catholicism. The son of a stoutly Bible-Protestant mother and a father politically opposed to the civil emancipation of Catholics, Ruskinfound it increasingly difficult to combine his inherited anti-Catholicism with his appreciation of Byzantine-Venetian, Renaissance-humanist, and Franciscan-evangelical art and the program for living these contained or implied. The rumors in late life of his immanent conversion to Rome proved unfounded, but they were not implausible. All Great Art is Praise seeks to show why.

A Grammar of Consent

This book explores the Liturgy as the manifestation by cultic signs of Christian revelation, the 'setting' of the Liturgy in terms of architectural space, iconography and music, and the poetic response which the revelation the Liturgy carries can produce. The conclusion offers a synthetic statement of the unity of religion, cosmology and art. Aidan Nichols makes the case for Christianity's capacity to inspire high culture - both in principle and through well-chosen historical examples which draw on the best in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism.

In the second edition of this major work, Dominican theologian Aidan Nichols provides a systematic account of the origins, development and recent history-now updated-of the relations between Rome and all separated Eastern Christians. By the end of the twentieth century, events in Eastern Europe, notably the conflict between the Orthodox and Uniate Churches in the Ukraine and Rumania, the tension between Rome and the Moscow patriarchate over the re-establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in the Russian Federation, and the civil war in the then federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, brought attention to the fragile relations between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which once had been two parts of a single Communion. At the start of the twenty-first century, in the pontificate of Benedict XVI, a papal visit to Russia-at the symbolic level, a major step forward in the 'healing of memories'- appears at last a realistic hope. In addition, the schisms separating Rome from the two lesser, but no less interesting, Christian families, the Assyrian (Nestorian) and Oriental Orthodox (Monophysite) Churches, are examined. The book also contains an account of the origins and present condition of the Eastern Catholic Churches-a deeper knowledge of which, by their Western brethren, was called for at the Second Vatican Council as well as by subsequent synods and popes. Providing both historical and theological explanations of these divisions, this illuminating and thought-provoking book chronicles the recent steps taken to mend them in the Ecumenical Movement and offers a realistic assessment of the difficulties (theological and political) which any reunion would experience.

The author at the centre of this study, Russian priest-theologian Nikolai Nikolaevich Afanas'ev, was perhaps the most influential thinker about the Church Russia has produced. In Aidan Nichols's careful evaluation, he emerges as a key figure in the rapprochement of Christian East and West, and most notably of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. Nichols illustrates how Afanas'ev has been influential in two key respects: first of all in his conviction that the Eucharist constitutes the foundation of the whole Church; and secondly in his contribution to an Orthodox understanding of the role of the Roman Church and bishop in the context of a united Church. Afanas'ev's achievements are seen to have continuing relevance in view of the inauguration of the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue at the monastery of St John on Patmos in 1980, and the importance of his thinking in terms of contemporary ecumenism becomes clear. It is to such a reappraisal that this book - concerned as it is with how Russian orthodoxy understands the Church - is devoted, in the hope of an eventual restoration of unity between the Orthodox of all the Russias and the see of Rome.

This Homiliary provides a comprehensive guide to doctrinally based preaching for the entire Church year, presented in the Dominican tradition: a preaching of Scripture which takes doctrine as guide to the clarification of the Bible's main themes. Doctrine is necessary to preachers because in its absence the Scriptural claims and themes do not easily hang together. The grace the Word imparts always has a reference to the Mystical Body which mediates all the grace that is given by Christ as the Head. So, precisely as a fruit of grace, preaching is necessarily related to ecclesial awareness. Doctrine ensures that preaching does not fall short of its true dimensions - expressing the biblical revelation, the faith of the Church. The second, third, and fourth volumes of Year of the Lord's Favour cover between them the Temporal Cycle of the Church of the Roman rite: this third volume furnishes texts for Sundays through the Year; the second for the Privileged Seasons - Advent, Christmastide, Lent and Eastertide; the fourth for Weekdays through the Year. Preaching about the lives of the saints provides the subject matter of the first volume of the Homiliary.

An exemplary summary of the state of Catholic theology and what appears to be its future.

This historical treatment of Catholic theology looks not to the content of that theology but rather to the form in which that content is contained and how it is expressed. Faithful to Catholic teaching yet critical, discerning yet impartial, Nichols offers this introduction to dogmatic theology, with the firm belief that dogmatics are the center of theology, and that any theological discipline which cuts itself off from these heartlands does so at its own peril. For it is in dogmatics that theology is in touch with the heart of revelation, and only by virtue of the quality of its contact with that revelation is thinking Christian at all.

Though comprehensive and far-reaching, this work is not beyond the understanding of people just commencing a study of theology. It makes an excellent text for study groups.

Mary continues to be a source of theological interest and concern for Catholics and Protestants alike. For Catholics, Mariology was codified in a set of dogmas over the centuries; yet many Catholics remain unaware of the biblical, historical, and theological matrix that gave rise to the magisterial teaching. Protestants, with some exceptions, remain skeptical of Marianism in Catholic theology, viewing such as intrusions upon biblical doctrine and faith or unnecessary accretions threatening of sound Christian theology. Aidan Nichols, OP, attempts to address this "puzzlement" of Mary. Working through the biblical, patristic, and medieval sources, Nichols introduces readers to the robust scriptural and theological bases for the Church's celebration of Mary in its doctrine and liturgy, alongside the work of the Councils and the magisterium, to argue for the crucial relevance of Mary in the theological articulation of the gospel, the celebration and practice of the liturgy, and the sacramental life of the Church.